My flight over was uneventful. There was a charming old British woman sitting next to me on the flight. She was like a relic from the Victorian Era, smartly dressed, with a slight handicap as she had packed her glasses into her suitcase rendering her blind.
Thus, I became the seeing eyes for the unseen. I seemed to have done a good job until the very end when she insisted that she could see a beach as we were flying over Heathrow. How she could see this, I don't know as we were located in the middle of the plane. I just murmered, mmm, and when my young eyes could not confirm, she called for the stewardess. "Where are we? What beach are we at?" she asked. The stewardess, without missing a beat, replied, "Where are we? I don't know, somewhere on earth I suppose," and then walked off.Well, that got the missus riled to say the least and then I began to hear, in her very clipped accent, about what "cheek" young people have today. "Exactly where is the beach you see?" I asked, hoping to get her mind off the steward. She pointed and exclaimed, "Over there! You see, there's the sand, and the water, and it looks like the tide is coming in." Realization dawned on me and I had to stiffle a laugh. The "sand" was really the plane's wings with sunlight reflecting off it, the "water" was the early morning sky, and the "tide" was the clouds drift that covered the wing. "And what a lovely beach it is!" I exclaimed. "Yes, that's what I thought. That stewardess is a bit cheeky I think. I suppose she's just tired as it's been a long flight," sighed my seat companion as she settled back in for the landing. I couldn't help but smile and think, what will I be like when I'm her age?
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